RYAN MURPHY ON LATEST 'AHS' EPISODESAYS DIRECTOR HAS WORKED WITH SCORSESE, NOTES 'DEPARTED' FEEL AS WELL AS DE PALMALast week, Ryan Murphy answered some questions about the latest episode of American Horror Story: Asylum for Entertainment Weekly's Tim Stack. Below are the first few questions of the interview:

And this one felt very Brian De Palma-esque, like the split screen where Lana is escaping from Briarcliff felt very Dressed to Kill. Yes, of course. Alfonso also worked a lot with Martin Scorsese so I think it also felt very Departed to me. I loved it. I thought all the choices were so fresh and so original. I loved the progressions of the characters. I really loved and I think the audience will love seeing Lana be that Hitchcock heroine. I thought the production design was brilliant. It was an episode of happy mistakes because so many things that we wrote and so many locations we wanted weren’t available. Like that mausoleum was a happy accident. It wasn’t at all what was written but it was available.

INCIDENTALLY...I went to see Gangster Squad today. It's a pretty good movie, and definitely pulls shot ideas from De Palma's The Untouchables, as well as other gangster movies (and the slow-motion scene in which Ryan Gosling's character turns and decides he is going to go after Mickey Cohen after all reminded me of the great Kirk Douglas slow-motion anger gun march in the big set-piece of De Palma's The Fury). In all fairness to director Ruben Fleischer, it is obvious that if he pulled from any of these shots, they are just blips in a movie he has made his own way. Gangster Squad could have been a weightier film under a different director, with this great cast and this script, but as it stands, it is a fast-paced entertainment that, while it sometimes feels a bit too slick for its own good, still manages to satisfy.

Sean Penn gives a great performance, and I noticed a familiar face: Holt McCallany, who had a brief scene with Penn in De Palma's Casualties Of War in 1989 (see picture below), plays Mickey Cohen's right hand man and bodyguard in Gangster Squad (that's him sitting next to Emma Stone in the image above). What a coincidence, 24 years later. UPDATE Thanks to Alex in the comments section for pointing out that another Casualties Of War cast member, Don Harvey, also appears in Gangster Squad as a police officer. Harvey also had a brief scene with Kevin Costner in The Untouchables.

Andrew O'Hehir, Salon"If you view Ruben Fleischer’s Gangster Squad as a violent period crime thriller in a familiar dress-up vein – as a capable imitation of better movies by Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Roman Polanski – it’s reasonably successful entertainment. It’s got overacting from Sean Penn, beneath a ton of makeup, as legendary Los Angeles mob boss Mickey Cohen, along with underacting from Ryan Gosling as the slightly nebbishy romantic lead and down-the-middle acting from Josh Brolin as its upright cop hero. Add in the digitally re-created, noir-flavored locations of postwar L.A. and the dazzling eye candy of Emma Stone in terrific period dresses and heartbreaking auburn hair and, hey – by the standards of midwinter Hollywood releases, not bad at all.

"But let’s back up for a second and talk about propaganda and how it really works. I’d like to declare a temporary truce around the issue of Zero Dark Thirty and its depiction of torture, at least long enough for us to agree that the question of whether or not the film is propagandistic is now a matter of extensive public discourse. Nearly no one will raise such questions about Gangster Squad, because it does not depict recent history and because it’s a conspicuously artificial Hollywood entertainment released in January. One could argue, however, that those things make it more effective as propaganda than an overtly disturbing film like Zero Dark Thirty could ever hope to be, since the message delivery is almost invisible...

"Many superior films about the murkier eras of L.A.’s past, most prominently Chinatown and L.A. Confidential, have been profoundly shaped by an awareness of the darkness beneath the California dream. On the surface, Gangster Squad is simply a trivial entertainment that doesn’t care (Fleischer’s previous films are the comedies Zombieland and 30 Minutes or Less), but beyond that it paints a fundamentally mendacious portrait. Will Beall’s screenplay (based, to a very limited extent, on a book by Paul Lieberman) posits a lot of ludicrous patriotic conversation, in which cops stand around at backyard barbecues exclaiming that, by God, they fought Hitler for American freedom and they’ll be damned if they let Mickey Cohen take it away again."

Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe"Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It’s almost terrible. It’s almost entertaining. But it’s missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between — loud, flashy, and unnecessary.

"It’s almost like every popular movie about crooks and cops made in the last four decades, but never enough like its own movie. An extended gunfight mimics the famous train-station staircase shootout in The Untouchables. But mimic is all it does. A lot of people who’ll see Gangster Squad will also have seen The Untouchables. So they’ll watch Josh Brolin and Ryan Gosling as cops blasting their guns and sliding across marble floors and know it was better in Brian De Palma’s movie. That’s because De Palma didn’t carve up the space the way Ruben Fleischer has with Gangster Squad.

"They’ll see whatever Sean Penn is going for as Mickey Cohen, the real-life East Coast criminal who tries to take over the Los Angeles underworld in 1949, and miss Al Pacino’s Tony Montana or Robert De Niro’s Al Capone. Penn spews like a boiling radiator, which is much closer to Pacino’s Big Boy Caprice in Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy. But Big Boy Caprice was a work of Pop Art — a Roy Lichtenstein of Tony Montana...

"Penn’s physique is to be admired more than feared or desired. He doesn’t provide menace or heat or sex. And the role doesn’t have enough going on for him to rise to the iconic, unembarrassed brazenness of Pacino in Scarface. Rather, it brings him low. The movie’s been lighted and colored so that whenever Penn does anything, he actually looks like something The Polar Express digitized. Everybody in Gangster Squad is like this. They’re almost human."

Jeffrey Wells, Hollywood Elsewhere"Last May I speculated that Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad would be a low-grade L.A. version of Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. It had to bring in the under-35s, who hate yesteryear environments that aren't familiar and video-gamey, and that meant going downmarket. On 1.4, having read Michael Cieply's assessment of the film, I expressed concern that it might turn out "a little dumber and more primitive" than expected.

"Well, I saw Gangster Squad last night and it's primitive, all right. Primitive like a smart, well-trained ape. It's loutish, cocky, smirking and swaggering. I brought a digital bullet-counter to the screening, and I can report that 478,446 bullets are fired in Gangster Squad. Early on some faceless stooge gets torn into two pieces and is then eaten by coyotes. And yet -- this is the odd part -- Fleischer's film is half-intelligent. The first part is stupidly effective, and that always takes a little brains.

"Fleischer's pulpy, strutting direction and Will Beall's blunt, pared-down screenplay combine to create a hunk of mythical fantasy video-game bullshit machismo period porn, but the first act of Gangster Squad is not moronic, and for a while I was mildly entertained. It felt like it was channeling the spirit of Roger Corman's Machine Gun Kelly ('58) or Don Siegel's Baby Face Nelson (57) but with more throttle and brass-knuckles style, and with a heftier budget.

"But then it gets weighed down by repetition -- every decision by each and every character is flamboyant and basic and gorilla-crude -- and then the standard desire to out-blast the last action shoot-em-up kicks in, and Gangster Squad just goes whacko and smacko and sluggo, and then it machine-guns itself to death."

Duane Dudek, JS Online"Although echoes of Brian De Palma's The Untouchables run through it, the no-holds-barred violence of Gangster Squad seems more inspired by De Palma's Scarface; a body tied to two cars is torn in half, complete with a bird's-eye view of the remains; a drill to the skull suggests Scarface's chainsaw-shower scene; and a slo-mo massacre in a hotel lobby decorated for Christmas is as nutty as Tony Montana's staircase shootout."

Piers Marchant, The Democratic Gazette"The film also has significantly large shoes to fill, not only competing against the best of cinematic L.A. noir (Chinatown and L.A. Confidential to name but two sterling examples), but also against De Palma’s glittering gold standard from 1987.

"On its own merits, this film is simply not very good; compared to some of the classics that came before, it fails miserably. Instead of Costner’s Elliot Ness being forced to confront his fractured morality in order to bring justice to the loss of his men, we have a big, dumb galoot whose only play in all situations is to go barreling into danger head-on and hope that he comes out the other side. The fact that the film continuously lets him get away with it is the real crime here."

Lou Lumenik, New York Post"The true inspiration for Gangster Squad — like so many other period films these days — is actually other movies, principally Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, which was written by David Mamet. Unfortunately, Fleischer and Beall (a former LAPD detective-turned-novelist) take their material much less seriously than De Palma or Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential)...

"A shootout in a Hollywood hotel lobby is modeled on the train-station sequence in The Untouchables, but Fleischer lacks De Palma’s instincts for such subtleties as camera placement and editing, so it quickly devolves into tedium."

Rob Hunter, Film School Rejects"Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables is a fantastic movie, isn’t it? The film weaves a story of good and evil, duty and ambition through a vaguely historical lens and comes out the other side with a movie that manages pure pop entertainment secured by serious turns of event, memorable characters and real emotional weight. Ruben Fleischer‘s Gangster Squad wants so badly to straddle that same line, but while it’s a fun, casually entertaining ride it falls flatter than Billy Drago whenever it tries to be more than a bloody and funny cartoon...

"This is a fun flick thanks to a humorous script from Will Beall, some game performances, and a director (alongside cinematographer Dion Beebe) who knows how to shoot and frame some wildly energetic action scenes against a beautifully rendered Los Angeles of old. The movie just looks good, from the set design to the costumes to Fleischer’s beloved slow-motion carnage during some fantastically staged shoot-outs and brawls. It’s also pretty damn funny with one-liners and gags delivered effortlessly by Gosling and friends.

"The problems arise when the movie tries to be anything but entertaining, and it’s here where most of the blame falls on Beall’s otherwise funny script. The jokes work, but other parts die a quick and painful death before our eyes. The biggest misfire is a romantic subplot between Wooters and one of Cohen’s dames (Emma Stone) that feels forced, dull, and lacking even an inkling of the chemistry the two shared in Crazy, Stupid, Love. It may be out of her control, but Stone doesn’t help matters by feeling completely inappropriate for the time period. She just doesn’t fit. I blame her eyes.

"The film also suffers whenever events turn serious or dark. With one exception that’s saved in the editing, the script’s attempts at emotion and loss just hang limply in the air wearing signs begging for audience reaction, but they just feel obvious and expected instead. Penn’s crime boss Cohen should feel threatening as he commits some truly heinous acts, but it’s impossible to feel genuinely unnerved by him, thanks in equal parts to his facial prosthetics that tease early concept art from Dick Tracy and his channeling of Robert De Niro’s exaggerated mugging as Al Capone.

"Speaking of The Untouchables…while few films can claim the label of truly original, it can’t go unnoticed how much of an influence De Palma’s classic really is here. In addition to the entire setup as described in the opening paragraph above there are a couple scenes lifted wholesale along with certain character deaths that match up pretty directly between the films. There are far worse films you could crib from, but still."

Matt Goldberg, Collider"Sadly, when compared to other films in the genre, Gangster Squad can’t help but feel like a missed opportunity. Even the screenplay seems to acknowledge its limitations as characters make cursory references to their experiences in World War II. These are men who can’t stop fighting, but the weight of war never comes off as a heavy burden. Instead, Gangster Squad lightly walks in the footsteps of other crime flicks, most notably Brian De Palma‘s The Untouchables. But whereas the 1987 crime flick had memorable characters, dialogue, and a tremendous performance from Sean Connery, Gangster Squad is a fun but forgettable action flick that should be far better considering the strength of its premise and the talent of its cast."

Scott Renshaw, Isthmus"The whole package is sporadically effective for a while, primarily in the sheer momentum it builds. It's also fairly satisfying in the places it diverges most from The Untouchables, especially when Gosling's cynical, reluctantly crusading cop flirts with Cohen's girl...

"But eventually it becomes clear that there's just not enough going on beneath the surface when it comes to character relationships. To make matters worse, the surface itself starts to feel far too familiar as Fleischer mimics the style and structure of The Untouchables."

David Edelstein, Vulture"The period thriller Gangster Squad plays like an untalented 12-year-old’s imitation of Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. Josh Brolin is the two-fisted cop who won’t follow the rules if that means turning a blind eye to injustice … and are you noticing that even my own language is clichéd, as if the picture’s lack of inspiration were a contagion? I’m sick of goddamned vigilantes, if only because they exist nowhere but onscreen and yet fuel the macho-paranoid fantasies of gun nuts in the real world...

"The director, Ruben Fleischer, made the mysteriously well-liked Zombieland, which cannibalized George Romero’s zombie mythos the way Gangster Squad cannibalizes De Palma’s Chicago. There isn’t a frame in the film that looks like anything other than a third-rate movie. De Palma gave us operatic grandeur; Fleischer, dinner theater with an overqualified cast. This is a movie empowered by top agents, the ones who tell a Gosling or Stone that they need to mix crowd-pleasing, big-check studio action pictures with finer, lower budget, more serious films — and then discourage those actors from doing said serious films unless the roles are obvious Oscar bait.

"Maybe the worst thing about Gangster Squad is that it isn’t egregiously terrible, that it’s competent enough to make some viewers say, 'It was dumb but I enjoyed it.' Whenever that happens at a movie like this, an angel dies somewhere. There are plenty of dumb movies that leave you more alive; this one puts a hit on your soul."

Lou Gaul, Calkins Media"The producers of Gangster Squad should immediately mail a check — a very big one with numerous zeros — to Brian De Palma and attach a thank-you note.

"The R-rated picture lifts so many plot and character elements from De Palma’s law-and-order epic The Untouchables (1987) that the filmmaker should receive some type of recognition."

James Verniere, The Boston Herald"Imagine Brian De Palma’s pop classic The Untouchables without Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia or Robert De Niro and his baseball bat, or Ennio Morricone or De Palma’s directing flourishes. What would you have? You’d have Gangster Squad. The worst crime committed in this paltry film is plagiarism. Untouchables scribe David Mamet should get a percentage...

"The screenplay by Will Beall of TV’s Castle is based on a book by journalist Paul Lieberman, but still seems entirely derivative. Instead of Raymond Chandler or playwright Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), Beall’s dialogue is reminiscent of the witless cop banter on TV’s Hawaii Five-O.

"Gangster Squad, which was held from release because one of its scenes recalled the Aurora, Colo. shooting (it was reportedly cut), boasts the usual action: brutal hand-to-hand fights, a fake-looking CGI car chase and blazing shootouts with Thompson submachine guns, shotguns and pistols.

"The film notably name checks Ma and Pa Kettle, Claude Rains and Slapsy Maxie’s. I liked Penn’s performance better when Al Pacino gave it in Scarface. For his part, Brolin speaks in a mumbling, tough-guy monotone that makes O’Mara sound like he’s taken too many knocks. The retro-L.A. locales are nicely evoked, including the art deco Park Plaza Hotel, but L.A. Confidential this ain’t."

"The storyline may be far from original but the witty dialogue, delivered with relish by an impressive cast, keeps the action fizzing along nicely...

"This is by no means a bad film. It's witty, has a handsome cast and plenty of zippy action.

"But it's not one you will still be thinking of in ten years' time.

"If you are, you might be confusing it with a Brian De Palma film."

Ethan Alter, Television Without Pity"The easiest way to ease into a discussion of Gangster Squad, the fedora-era set, City of Angels-based cops vs. crooks action movie from Zombieland director Ruben Fleischer, is to describe what the movie is not. For starters, it's not a serious take on old-school film noir in the tradition of Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Neither is it a twisty detective story like The Big Sleep or square-jawed, no-nonsense crime picture like The Public Enemy. It's also not a richly stylized comic book take on the period like Dick Tracy. And it's definitely not a successful piece of pop art mythmaking like the film it most clearly aspires to be, Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. Above all, in case you couldn't tell already, it's also not a good movie.

"So given all the things that the movie is not, what exactly is Gangster Squad then? Well, from where I was sitting, it mainly resembled an excuse for a group of overeager kids to play dress-up in their mom and dad's clothes on a major studio's dime."

"When you finally see a movie that set a thousand ripples flowing through the culture, it can appear to be a victim of its own influence, as though it were only a two-bit satellite for all those ripples and not their source.

"I was a little kid when Scarface came out but I remember its release, mainly because my father and my uncle made an outing of it. I particularly recall the two of them standing in the foyer in their overcoats, excited but stern as I sulked about being left behind. They never went to the movies together, so what made this one so special, and why couldn’t I come? 'It’s not for you,' they repeated as they swept out the door, leaving me with the bitter, mournful taste of leather-scented air.

"There are more direct references to other gangster movies in Gangster Squad, Ruben Fleischer’s garish genre wank, but like most post-1983 gangster movies (and rap videos), indirect references to Scarface abound. Of course De Palma was himself updating the original Howard Hawks version from 1932, which was loosely based on the exploits of Al Capone. Capone was said to love the film so much he had his own print.

"There’s just something about gangsters and Hollywood: they like it; it likes them. Gangster movies have been inbreeding this love for generations, producing one golden child—a Chinatown, Goodfellas, Untouchables, or L.A. Confidential—for every litter of cross-eyed duds. The best that can be said for Gangster Squad is that it secures, for now, the position of alpha dud, the fedora-capped king of clichés. It’s less a gangster movie than a gangster mutation with tommy-gun Tourette’s."

Jeff Meyers, Metrotimes"Though it tries mightily, The Untouchables it ain’t. First of all, screenwriter Will Beall is no David Mamet. And as stylish as director Ruben Fleischer can be, he just doesn’t have the cinematic chops to match Brian De Palma. Finally, while Sean Penn’s cartoonish scenery-chewing is good for a chuckle or two, it never comes close to the operatic menace that Robert de Niro brought to Al Capone.

"Now, normally I might say that it’s not fair to hold these two films up next to each other. But Fleischer and his team invite the comparisons. Not only does De Niro’s menacing rant, 'I want him dead. I want his family dead.' get re-created by Penn as a frothing shriek of, 'I want them all dead! … I want their pets dead!' but Gangster Squad’s finale tries to emulate De Palma’s train station shoot-’em-up (which was borrowed from Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, no less) with a hotel grand staircase slow-mo tommy-gun battle that looks like an early ’90s music video. Though adequately entertaining because of its cast, relentless action and setting, Gangster Squad can’t help but play like a third-generation knockoff."

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune"Some of these characters are based on the record, others are made up, and most of the dialogue is made of wood, befitting such rejoinders as: Let's give him 'a permanent vacation in a pine box!' The template for Gangster Squad, based on Paul Lieberman's nonfiction account and goosed up by screenwriter Will Beall, is clearly Brian De Palma's The Untouchables, written by David Mamet. Good template; weak variation."

Lance Harris, TechCentral"Like Al Capone, the real Mickey Cohen was eventually pinched for tax evasion. Without spoiling the ending of the film, this is not what happens in Gangster Squad. Perhaps director Ruben Fleischer figured that he wouldn’t copy the ending of Brian De Palma’s classic The Untouchables after imitating nearly everything else about it.

"Fleischer keeps it all moving along at quite a brisk pace, though his take on the mob movie is nowhere nearly as successful as his zom-com Zombieland. Part of the problem is that he seems unsure whether he is aiming for the comic book noir of Sin City or the period authenticity of LA Confidential, resulting in a mix of uneven tones. The film also has a glossy digital look that is at odds with its post-World War 2 setting."

Matt Barone, Complex"Which could also describe Fleischer's visual approach in Gangster Squad, a bloated, borderline animated veneer that looks and feels like Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy drained of all its enjoyable campiness. There's poorly handled, exploitation-level camp here, sure (Penn's Cohen makes his appropriately malicious debut by having a guy chained to moving vehicles and ripped in half), but Fleischer can't ever decide what Gangster Squad should be: a snappy gangster show set in a heightened reality, a gritty extension of Brian De Palma's far superior The Untouchables, or a wink-wink comedy that (desperately) seeks high-five from its audience.

"By the time Gangster Squad reaches its video-game-like climax inside the Park Plaza Hotel—where Tommy guns, bullets, an anonymous goons' corpses reach dopily high counts—it's not even worth putting into any of those thematic categories. Just file it under 'Epic Fails.'"

'GANGSTER SQUAD' FINALLY ARRIVESAND THE 'UNTOUCHABLES' COMPARISONS HAVE BEEN COMING ALL WEEK

From the start, Gangster Squad, directed by Ruben Fleischer, has been a project in the shadow of Brian De Palma's The Untouchables. The film finally arrives in theaters today, and critics left and right are comparing it to De Palma's film, with a couple even mentioning De Palma's Scarface in their reviews, as well as other gangster pictures. (In fact, Fleischer lists Scarface among his five favorite gangster films.) Here are some links to reviews, with quotes:

James Berardinelli, Reel Views"There seems to be little doubt that Ruben Fleischer, the director behind the well-received Zombieland and the less well-received 30 Minutes or Less, is a Brian De Palma fan. How else to explain the kinship that exists between Fleischer's latest, Gangster Squad, and De Palma's classic The Untouchables (with a little Scarface thrown in for good measure)? The similarities go beyond the requisite plot points that exist in all gangland stories; Gangster Squad unspools almost like a remake of The Untouchables, albeit with a souped-up ending and a relocation from Prohibition Era Chicago to post-WWII Los Angeles. There's no Battleship Potemkin homage, but there is a nod to Sunset Blvd. Gangster Squad is an unashamedly pulpy thriller that borders at times on an exploitation flick but its determination to follow The Untouchables' template (without the benefit of a David Mamet script) makes it a little too predictable to be memorable.

"Steeped in blood, gore, and violence, Gangster Squad delivers what fans of the gangster genre expect from a movie of this sort. It's chock-full of 'guilty pleasure' moments. Sean Penn, playing real-life mobster Mickey Cohen, hams it up expertly, channeling Al Pacino's Tony Montana without the accent. The good guys are stolid, sturdy men - paragons of virtue up against a feral villain who is so vile that even the notorious Chicago mob can't stand against him. Despite the talent of the cast, Gangster Squad isn't a 'prestige' motion picture and its release date shift from September 7 to January 11 didn't damage its nonexistent Oscar chances. It's an inferior Untouchables knock-off and proud of it."

Nick de Semlyen, EMPIRE"Is The Untouchables untouchable? Gangster Squad director Ruben Fleischer has set out to prove not. His slick, all-star film takes the same dynamic as Brian De Palma’s Chicago classic — law-enforcers go off the books to battle a gangster on his own dirty terms — and transplants it to LA, aiming for something bigger, glitzier, nastier. But while it’s not lacking in visual razzle-dazzle or blood, story-wise it rarely manages to shock or excite.

"Where it does succeed, though, is with its villain. In The Untouchables, De Niro’s paunchy Al Capone put a baseball bat to foul use, but Sean Penn’s Mickey Cohen has even more lurid enthusiasms: dining on roast peacock, quoting Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, world-class swearing (he arrives at a raided brothel snarling, 'My whole crop of cunt is ruined.' Penn, wearing a prosthetic beak, has the time of his life. Behold as Cohen, in full view of the Hollywood sign, commands dogs to feast on a slain man’s innards. That’s the LA way...

"Gangster Squad is perfectly decent entertainment: it possesses a frequently witty script, a roster of likable, cool-looking stars, fizzy choreography and Sean Penn out-hamming Mr. Pricklepants. Yet there’s the lingering feeling that this is a safe studio film as opposed to a story that was burning to be told. Every beat is hit with mechanical efficiency, rather than taking risks and roaring with ambition. Not something you’d say about a Brian De Palma film."

Peter Debruge, Variety"Opening with a scene in which Cohen chains a rival between two cars as a message to his Chicago bosses, this macho genre homage lands closer to The Untouchables than to L.A. Confidential as a self-aware gloss on old gangster pics...

"In the good guys' corner, there's Ryan Gosling, Anthony Mackie, Giovanni Ribisi, Robert Patrick and Michael Pena (a refreshingly mixed-race bunch, despite the period). Opposite, there's Penn's larger-than-life performance as Cohen, a feat of unbridled entitlement. He fumes and storms like some kind of Cro-Magnon monster who just stumbled from the cave to claim what is rightfully his, feral intensity amplified to a pitch not to be dwarfed by Al Pacino's Tony Montana, Robert De Niro's Al Capone or Harvey Keitel's own spin on Cohen in Bugsy."

Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine"Calling it 'derivative' implies someone else having done this kind of thing before – and done it better. Well, gee, where to start? If you were to call this a West Coast version of The Untouchables, you wouldn’t be far off the mark, right down to a machine-gun fight on a large public staircase.

Oh wait, that’s right: Brian De Palma was quoting yet another film, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with his shoot-out in Chicago’s Union Station. I won’t accuse Fleischer of mimicking De Palma, because it seems obvious. Young filmmakers have been sampling Scarface on a regular basis for almost 30 years."

Siobhan Synnot, The Scotsman"There are plenty of shootouts, slashings and the occasional bloody amputation, but little variety or thought to the script. Whenever a kingpin appears to shrug off some major cock-up in his empire, surely any self-respecting henchman realises this is his cue to flee, or at least pack a bulletproof vest? Not if you are a henchman in Gangster Squad. And while Penn attempts to bully his way through the film, his Cohen has none of internal subtleties of, say, Robert De Niro in The Untouchables."

Bill Goodykoontz, AZ Central"The film is somewhat similar in structure and temperament to The Untouchables, Brian De Palma’s far superior 1987 film about Eliot Ness going after Al Capone. The head-on approach can only work for so long, so other methods must be found. As with De Palma’s film, despite being the good guys, O’Mara and his men must resort to unsavory, extra-legal means to level the playing field.

"There is a really good story in here somewhere. Cohen is a fascinating figure, operating in an interesting time. Here he’s a cardboard cutout, prone to hilarious bouts of rage (and bouts, period; he was a boxer). Think of any gangster cliché you’ve seen or heard, and Penn delivers. He is nothing if not thorough. Usually that’s a good thing. Here, not so much."

Chris Tilly, IGN"Another film in whose shadow Gangster Squad will undoubtedly exist is The Untouchables, for while that film is set in a different city some 20 years earlier, their storylines are remarkably similar. Yet Brian De Palma’s Oscar-winner trumps Fleischer’s effort on pretty much every front, managing to entertain and excite while at the same time making the agents who eventually brought down Al Capone three-dimensional characters."

Nick Pinkerton, OC Weekly"It's obvious, however, that [screenwriter Will] Beall is mostly drawing on his experience with other movies, particularly the previous generation of revisionist period crime dramas, such as Brian De Palma's 1987 The Untouchables, which Gangster Squad's plot hews close to, and Curtis Hanson's 1997 L.A. Confidential. Unlike Hanson's film, which had a shoe-leather realism, Gangster Squad looks as if all its details—each shiny Packard and bottle of Orange Nehi—have been scrupulously 'placed,' still warm from the art department, while panoramic shots recall no terrestrial city so much as the virtual environments of Rockstar Games' LA Noire."

Alonso Duraldi, The Wrap"With its gleaming roadsters, sexy dames and swanky nightspots, Gangster Squad is clearly meant to summon fond memories of post-WWII-era noir films, not to mention more recent retro valentines like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. But you’ll be forgiven for thinking that you’re watching The Untouchables II.

"Like David Mamet and Brian De Palma’s reboot of the classic crimebuster TV show, this new movie offers a stalwart cop with a devoted, red-headed wife, putting together a crew of renegade cops (including an old-timer and a bespectacled nerd) to take down a powerful and sadistic mobster played by a Method-fueled scenery chewer."

Dann Gire, Daily Herald"I liked the Chicago version of Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad much better. It was titled The Untouchables.

"Will Bealls' screenplay to Gangster Squad, based on the book by Paul Lieberman, appears to have appropriated the American western conventions in Brian De Palma's 1987 Chicago-shot thriller, right down to the good guys' lovable, nerdy mascot purchasing the farm to cement our emotional opposition to the villains.

"It's all about a straight-shooting law man and dedicated family guy assembling a crack team of peace officers to wage a street war against a ruthlessly murderous, megalomaniac, big-city mob boss with most of the government in his back pocket.

"Gangster Squad throws in an extra romantic subplot and a climatic bare-knuckles boxing match, but nonetheless prompts comparisons to The Untouchables, right down to Sean Penn's recreation of mob boss Mickey Cohen as the raging Al Capone of L.A.

M. Faust, ArtVoice"Not much beyond the title remains for this movie, which essentially reprises Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables for a Boardwalk Empire audience. Instead of Al Capone, the bad guy is Mickey Cohen, played ferociously by Sean Penn in a performance that you wish were in a better movie: The real Cohen was a lot more interesting than this one-note hoodlum. Josh Brolin has the Kevin Costner part (by way of Boardwalk’s Michael Shannon) of Sergeant John O’Mara, the straight arrow enlisted to assemble a band to work on the outer edges of the law.

"You can play this game all day if you want: Nerdly Charles Martin Smith is played by Giovanni Ribisi, ethnic outsider Andy Garcia by Michael Pena, etc. There’s even a moment of rage by Cohen, vowing vengeance on O’Mara, that is so similar to Capone’s rant in the De Palma movie ('I want him dead! I want his family dead!') that it has to be intentional.

"Gangster Squad gets high marks for its production design, recreating post-war LA as a riot of art deco glitz. It’s a great movie to look at, but blandly directed and photographed."

Cornish Guardian, This Is Cornwall"Disappointingly, Fleischer's film lacks the finely detailed characters and dramatic tension of Brian De Palma's Prohibition-era drama."

Jeremy Kirk, First Showing"The inevitable 'I want them all dead' tirade Penn's Cohen goes on is nothing as powerful or as memorable as Robert De Niro as Al Capone vowing vengeance against Kevin Costner's Elliott Ness, and the moments of violence against the Gangster Squad would be riveting if they weren't so familiar. By the time the film turns towards a shoot-out around an elaborate staircase and hotel lobby, you can't help but think it would be just as easy and a whole lot more fun to watch Brian De Palma's film and be done with it."

Mark Naglazas, The West Australian"Gangster Squad was pulled after the cinema shooting in Aurora, Colorado, during a showing of The Dark Knight Rises and its climax, which originally took place in a movie theatre, reshot so that it now resembles the ending of Brian de Palma's Scarface."

'AMERICAN HORROR STORY' SPLIT-SCREENSEQUENCE ON LAST NIGHT'S EPISODE VIEWED AS ANOTHER HOMAGE TO DE PALMA

The above shot is from a tense split-screen sequence on last night's episode ("Spilt Milk") of American Horror Story: Asylum. The episode was stylishly directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon, and was so full of surprises it felt like a season finale-- and the finale is still a couple of weeks away.

In any case, any time anyone these days does a split-screen sequence, Brian De Palma's name comes to mind, and this one is no different, with Entertainment Weekly's Jeff Jensen and Zap 2 it's Geoff Berkshire, among others, mentioning De Palma in their recaps of the episode. And of course, we know that Ryan Murphy has said that this season of AHS pays homage to De Palma, so it seems entirely likely that the split-screen was a nod to him.

The split screen happens on the stairs inside the asylum, and the technique allows Gomez-Rejon to create and milk a good amount of suspense between three characters as one tries to slip past another, and the third tries to distract.

In the first episode of this season, Pino Donaggio music from De Palma's Carrie was used in several scenes. This week's episode utilized music from Bernard Rose's Candyman, composed by Phillip Glass, during several sequences, including the split-screen sequence.

DE PALMA INAUGURAL SUBJECT OF NEW FILM SERIES"THE WORKS" MIDNIGHT SERIES AT BROOKLYN'S NITEHAWK BEGINS THIS WEEKENDNitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn, New York, begins a new midnight series this weekend called "The Works," which "pays special attention and homage to the people and concepts who inspire a closer look," according to the Nitehawk website. "As Nitehawk’s extended series, The Works highlights a director, actor, composer, genre, or influencer on select midnight screenings over a three-month period."

The series will launch with Brian De Palma as the initial subject, beginning with midnight screenings of Dressed To Kill this Friday and Saturday (January 11 and 12). Five more De Palma films will continue the series over the next couple of months: Femme Fatale (February 1 & 2), Blow Out (February 8 & 9), Obsession (February 15 & 16), Raising Cain (March 1 & 2), and Body Double (March 15 & 16).

Nitehawk is an 18-and-older cinema that serves food and beverages, including specialty dishes and drinks inspired by the films being featured. "The Cinema also presents thirty-minute 'Pre-shows' tailored to each movie that feature local filmmakers and clips curated by our cinema department," according to the Nitehawk website.

MORE FRENCH PASSION FOR 'PASSION'CRITIC SURPRISED THAT DE PALMA MADE SUCH A PERSONAL FILM OUT OF CORNEAU REMAKETF1 News Film Critic Romain Le Vern posted a review today of Brian De Palma's Passion, calling it De Palma's "best film since... a long time." Le Vern echoes the review posted yesterday by Jean-Baptiste Morain, each with the suggestion that De Palma has made a personal film that stands among his finest works. Below is a Google-assisted translation of Le Vern's review:

------------------------------

"Two women engage in a perverse game of manipulation within a multinational corporation. Isabelle (Noomi Rapace) is fascinated by her superior (Rachel McAdams), Christine. The latter takes advantage of her influence over Isabella to drive into a game of seduction and manipulation, domination and servitude.

"On paper, this new feature by Brian De Palma presents itself as an American remake of the French Love Crime, the last film by the late Alain Corneau and far from the best. A project that a priori portends a controlled movie replay, sterile or impersonal. Surprise: it's not. From Dressed To Kill to Obsession, from Body Double to Snake Eyes, Brian De Palma has always been fascinated with the questions raised by the cinema and could never help but tell (almost) all his stories in the form of mise-en-scène.

"Although we thought he had broken his own obsessions with objects bordering on pastiche (Femme Fatale) and uninspired (his very unsuccessful adaptation of the cult novel by James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia, a very soft sci-fi Mission To Mars) and been ostracized from the system after taking the risk of anti-war Redacted (YouTube version of Casulaties Of War), Brian De Palma has regained form and his Passion marks a return with great fanfare to the overwrought cinema of the 70s Mannerist, reflecting the ambition of a system of manipulation by illusion.

"Hitchcock's ghost still haunts

"This manipulative maze-like film could be terminal like Mulholland Drive, David Lynch, fed self-citations (a lot of Sisters, a little Raising Cain), themes (voyeurism, fetishism, manipulation, schizophrenia, alienation), Biblical symbols and stylistic figures allow the auteur to settle scores. With himself. With his appetite for evil. Hitchcock with his superego.

"In search of beauty in vulgarity - the vulgarity of time exacerbated by the emergence of new media and new ways of espionage (sex tape, YouTube) such as social networks - De Palma films the grimey dreams of innocent girls, probes the impossibility of desire in a world of phallic metal towers in which women make war to seduce men and uses the original frame of Corneau to talk about what has always been connected: the truth rigged, optical illusions, false pretenses, artifice to describe subjectivity (the distortion of time, split-screen, the deformation of reality).

"Above all, we have to see the pleasure of Brian De Palma, simple pleasures and communicative, filming for the beauty of movement, especially in the operatic last half-hour amplified by the music of Pino Donaggio, reviving the best suspensions of disbelief from his past films such as, at random, the suspenseful sequence of the prom in Carrie. The final shot is both climax and nod to De Palma’s aficionados, causing a jolt.

"De Palma directed both actresses (Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams, impeccable) like lionesses, savoring the slow devouring of praying mantises. For a long time we do not know who the brunette or blonde, Hitchcock heroine or De Palma-esque bitch, proves the most toxic. But one thing is sure: dream into nightmare, nobody has been innocent."

MORAIN: 'PASSION' IS ONE OF DE PALMA'S FINEST"NO REALISM, BUT FORMALISM AT ALL COSTS; FILMED WITH GREAT PRECISION & MASTERY"

Les Inrockuptibles critic Jean-Baptiste Morain has just posted a review of Brian De Palma's Passion, which opens in France on February 13. Morain calls it one of De Palma's finest films. Below is a Google-aided translation of the review:

----------------------------------------------

"Funny idea on paper: the new De Palma is adapted from the last film directed by Alain Corneau, Love Crime, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, a game of manipulation that goes wrong between employees of the same company. What was the interest in this rather easy-going French thriller? He draws from it a film in his own way, the one that we prefer, a mixture of Hitchcock and Lang, erotic and morbid fever in an atmosphere where the baroque and fantastical reality and imagination are blurred constantly, where the characters are manipulated, to humiliate each other without really knowing who prevails over the other.

"No realism in Passion, but formalism at all costs. No plausibility either, but suspense, pitfalls, daydreams or nightmares that seem to fit into each other. Passion is also a film of women, mostly bisexual, a film where the one man band will leave pale and deceived like a rookie. Who is nice: blonde, brunette or redhead? Mystery. And if they were one? The twists succeed more twists in a game of mirrors where revenge leads the dance. Passion is nearly a genre film. De Palma returns to his 70s Hitchcockian vein, a period when he amused himself by making variations on the themes of the old master, to draw his own cinema, both haunted by the model and its ability to give life and day to a very personal film.

"De Palma said one day, in a bonus DVD: 'Hitchcock, I know very well of what he speaks.' Another way of saying acquaintances between fantasy filmmakers of Catholic formation, where sex is at the same time a horrific vision and completely exciting. Filmed with great precision, uncluttered, with a knife, with a mastery of every second, Passion is undoubtedly one of the finest films of Brian De Palma."

NEW GREVEN BOOK: 'PSYCHO-SEXUAL'LOOKS AT INFLUENCE OF HITCHCOCK ON DE PALMA, SCORSESE, FRIEDKINOur old friend David Greven has a new book, Psycho-Sexual, now available. Greven tells us that the book "is about Hitchcock and masculinity, and the influence of Htichcock on New Hollywood directors like De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin. I have two chapters on De Palma, whom I call the greatest of the New Hollywood directors in the book. The first is a revised, expanded version of the essay I wrote on the early Vietnam War-era comedies. The other is a new piece, a reassessment of Dressed To Kill. My effort in this book is to pay close attention to what critics often ignore, even supportive De Palma critics: the aesthetic and ideological aspects of De Palma's reworking of Hitchcock."

"Bridging landmark territory in film studies, Psycho-Sexual is the first book to apply Alfred Hitchcock’s legacy to three key directors of 1970s Hollywood—Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, and William Friedkin—whose work suggests the pornographic male gaze that emerged in Hitchcock’s depiction of the voyeuristic, homoerotically inclined American man. Combining queer theory with a psychoanalytic perspective, David Greven begins with a reconsideration of Psycho and the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much to introduce the filmmaker’s evolutionary development of American masculinity.

"Psycho-Sexual probes De Palma’s early Vietnam War draft-dodger comedies as well as his film Dressed to Kill, along with Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Friedkin’s Cruising as reactions to and inventive elaborations upon Hitchcock’s gendered themes and aesthetic approaches. Greven demonstrates how the significant political achievement of these films arises from a deeply disturbing, violent, even sorrowful psychological and social context. Engaging with contemporary theories of pornography while establishing pornography’s emergence during the classical Hollywood era, Greven argues that New Hollywood filmmakers seized upon Hitchcock’s radical decentering of heterosexual male dominance. The resulting images of heterosexual male ambivalence allowed for an investment in same-sex desire; an aura of homophobia became informed by a fascination with the homoerotic. Psycho-Sexual also explores the broader gender crisis and disorganization that permeated the Cold War and New Hollywood eras, reimagining the defining premises of Hitchcock criticism."